Mar 3 moveline - wrap it, ship it

Moveline connects people that are moving to companies that move stuff.
You send in a video of all your goods and are assigned a Move Captain
who generates an inventory, gets quotes from moving companies, and
handles arrangements and paperwork with the vendor you select. You, the
consumer, do everything through your Moveline Move Captain and never
have to deal directly with a moving company. The innovation of Moveline
is the way they 'wrap' the services of moving companies with a modern interface. This plays out in a few ways.

Video is generated via an easy-to-use mobile phone app. There is an
extensive sample video and it's easy to generate segments on a
room-by-room basis. Devices capable of reasonable-quality video have
nearly saturated the market. Now is the right time to push the moving
industry away from inscrutable forms and towards virtual tours. Very nice.

From the consumer perspective, the moving industry is not one full of
standards. Different companies take inventory in different ways, prices
can change unexpectedly, and quotes can be hard to compare. Moveline
hides much of this complexity behind a single approach to getting a
guaranteed rate. From the perspective of moving companies, movers are a
fickle bunch that consistently under- or mis-estimate the scale of their
possessions and are paranoid about getting a bad deal. Moveline takes
on some of the consumer-driven uncertainty on behalf of the vendors.
Being a middle man works both ways.

The Moveline system also creates network effects.
Moving companies are the most efficient when they are maximizing their
cargo space. With access to a reliably accurate market of moving jobs,
they may be able to keep trucks as full as possible by combining loads
going one way and being sure they don't come back empty. Efficiency in
vendor capacity usage may also lead to lower prices for consumers. A
pay-to-participate marketplace can benefit all involved - the buyers,
the sellers, and the marketplace itself.

Creating efficiency by wrapping a set of goods or services in a
marketplace is nothing new, but the application to the world of
moving is. I think that consumers will prefer a standard interface and
consistent, high-quality customer service. Consumer preference will
hopefully bring enough demand that vendors will be happy to get in on
the market.